Welcome to the Week #19

Welcome to the week!

The sunshine has come to DOZ. Well, not just to DOZ, but to the northern hemisphere in general, I guess. The spring weather is keeping everyone upbeat, there are chirping birds, there are flowers flowering, the leaves are green, and the pollen – that damned pollen – is everywhere.

Personally I’m somewhere between “Isn’t this the most wonderful weather” and “I can’t stop sneezing”.

Ah, spring – the hay fever down payment you have to make to collect the summer to come, right?

As the temperature heats up so does the marketing year. Conference season has arrived, companies are reporting their quarterly results and there is a ton of spinning to do, and as colleges wind down for the year there is a new flood of interns and young grads entering the marketing world and lifting the already high tempo higher still.

You need to be on your game to keep up but don’t panic: we’ll help you with our weekly round up of news from the marketing world.

What’s On Your Company Blog?

So you’ve got a blogging strategy for your business blog. You’ll plan some posts out, get an editorial calendar in order, and publish on a regular schedule. You’re not just throwing things against the wall but rather you are following a defined strategy with regular reviews and – so far – your business is growing fast. If the company is improving its position, if it’s dominating its market, and if it’s (dare we say it) disrupting the entire industry, then the marketing plan and the blog posts must be working, right?

Perhaps not. As Benji Hyam explains at Grow & Convert your business might be booming in spite of your blogging rather than because of it. Hyam explains how market leader Airbnb has pursued a blogging strategy that is essentially bland. Press releases, self referential posts about new features, and the odd self congratulatory post as Airbnb busts through another barrier or extends services to a new country. It might be content that is interesting to Airbnb the company, but it doesn’t promote the sort of engagement that a different content might.

Hyam explains how Airbnb can embrace a different content strategy on their blog to generate more engagement through user generated content. It’s a well argued piece and worth reading both for the critique that it offers of the stock-standard business blog format, and for the specific advice that might just be applied to your own business blog. As they say: read it all.

Freelance World

At DOZ we’re well in tune with the freelance and gig economy. Indeed our whole business is about connecting clients with marketing experts around the world who can help them deliver the sort of marketing that they need when they need it. We’ve empowered 7,000 individual marketing experts to tap into these clients and our marketing marketplace is helping everyone from experienced freelancers through to people dipping their toe in the gig economy waters to build their own work-life balance.

We’re not the only ones realizing this new way of work is expanding, however. LinkedIn have analyzed their own data and revealed that the number of freelancers on their platform is exploding. Among the takeaways from their research:

• The number of freelancers on LinkedIn has increased by 43% in just five years
• NYC, LA, San Francisco and Chicago are the most popular freelance digs
• Freelancers have more than twice the number of recommendations than the average LinkedIn user

But the most interesting factoid in the LinkedIn infographic? The most popular industry for freelancers is marketing. Looks like DOZ is ahead of the curve once again.

Listen Up

We’ve long known that including images in social media posts helps engagement. People like visuals and the right illustration, image, or GIF can help drive up likes, follows, and clicks from your audience. In other words, giving the audience something other than just plain text is one of the best ways to break through and win readers. But there is more than one sense to appeal to. Sure, you got eyes on your prize – but what about ears?

At Social Media Today Mindy Weinstein introduces a small but growing social networking app called Anchor. As Weinstein explains it, “Anchor is similar to other platforms, such as Twitter and Instagram, where you follow people and people follow you. However, it is packed with some pretty cool features and it is easy to get started. Through Anchor, you can record 2-minute sound bites, known as waves, which can be shared within the social audio app and on other platforms, such as Twitter.”

While the jury is still out on how much traction Anchor is going to get it is telling that some brands, including social media powerhouse Buffer and major corporations like General Electric, are already getting on board. The app is not difficult to use, though it does suffer from the same lack of audience that all new social networks do. It doesn’t always feel very social because there just isn’t the audience for the audio shares yet. On the other hand, there was a time before everyone you knew was on Facebook, so maybe they just need a little time. For marketers interested in reaching out to their audience in a new way, Anchor might be worth keeping an eye on.

This Week on The DOZ Blog 

There’s lots to get your teeth stuck into this week on The DOZ Blog. We’ve got articles about motivating your team without dropping a wheelbarrow’s worth of cash, we draw some parallels between endurance sports and the marketing of your business, we have a guest post on email marketing and we round out the week by examining the Twitter tactics of the one US presidential candidate who has owned the channel this cycle, Donald J. Trump.

Want More Marketing Goodness?

Every Monday morning DOZ delivers the best marketing content directly to inboxes around the world. Subscribe to DOZ’s Marketing Monday for a generous serving of the best in digital marketing, SEO, and the tactics and strategies to drive your business forward this year. Want in? Add your name to the list and start your week a little smarter.

Time to Get to Work

Know a great piece on marketing that we missed? If so, let us know and we’ll share it with the world, crediting your good self, of course, with the tip. Send your sources straight to Content Manager Dylan and you could be featured in next week’s Welcome to the Week post.

Sorry to break it to you but it has to be said: it’s Monday. You’ve got work to do, deadlines to meet, targets to crush, and goals to smash through on your way to the next weekend. It’s time to get yourself into gear and get started – welcome to the week.